Facing technological capacity constraints and evolving citizen expectations, the City of Lethbridge, the economic, industrial, and commercial center of southern Alberta, serving both its own population of over 100,000 people and its catchment area of over 350,000 residents, chose CGI as a partner to develop a master plan and roadmap for its digital transformation in order to provide more efficient and effective citizen-centered services to the community. Additionally, the City was seeking guidance on how to best leverage technology and innovation to reinvent how they operate, deliver their services, and achieve their missions.
Organizations across industries are undergoing massive digital transformations and are seeking newer and enhanced ways to meet dynamic customer and citizen demands. For state, provincial and local government executives in particular, top trends and priorities continue to center around improving citizen services and experiences.
Challenge: provide more efficient and effective citizen-centered services to the community
The City seeks to provide a level of access to city services that is in step with what citizens had come to expect with the other kinds of services they are able to access using the internet and smart phone technology.Â
Putting the citizen at the center and applying a human-centric methodology to creating services that work for the end-user was critical. The scope of the transformation involves a change in the culture, process, and technology at city hall. Our experience working with governments around the world, as well as domain experts in change management, customer experience, and digital strategy brought valuable insights to the project that helped map out those changes in these critical areas.Â
At CGI, we are enabling innovative, well-run and sustainable communities. Our municipal service model leverages human-centered design into practical service solutions that focus on actionable steps. We’re proud to see the ways that these steps improve the lives of citizens in the community and municipal governments’ ability to design, implement, and deliver meaningful services and solutions.
Our solution: a digital transformation roadmap
In partnership with the city, we crafted their Digital Transformation Master Plan, a compelling vision for implementing citizen-centric services, reflecting genuine needs and practical, actionable steps to get from vision to delivery. Online citizen surveys and key stakeholder workshops were leveraged and enabled us to outline the needs of those living and working in the community of Lethbridge, develop personas, ultimately providing insightful data to develop new services or refresh existing ones.
Through the series of workshops, research, and applying service design practices, we delivered a roadmap that outlined a strategy designed to:
- Replace the aging and costly on-premises servers with up-to-date cloud-based technology that could be applied to every business unit
- Develop a digital service and design standard, establishing a framework for the interface and design of any new online services that may be designed by the City in the future, including a template for an updated City of Lethbridge website and citizen portal
- Implement a one-stop service portal where citizens will be able to access all online city services
Value delivered: a valuable roadmap for the future
The resulting multi-year roadmap transformed the city's delivery model from a business-unit-focused approach to one that puts the citizen at the center of service design and delivery.
CGI’s Digital Transformation Master plan for the City offered recommendations for accelerated data-driven decision-making, a governance review, and an innovative service model that leverages human-centered design to deliver IT-based service solutions. In addition, adoption and involvement from the City’s business units was crucial in developing a successful digital transformation strategy.
Our team has been able to set the stage for the City's human-focused approach to delivering municipal services as well as offer a clear plan for updating important technological foundations and key IT infrastructure.